When the fog is sucked away from my mind like smoke through a vacuum, the truth that has been beyond my reach for months finally reveals itself.

But the relief I thought I would feel never comes, and I’m more afraid now than I was the morning I woke up handcuffed in King’s bed.

Because with the truth comes dark secrets I was never meant to know.

I will put the lives of those I love most at risk if I let on that my memory has returned, or if I seek help from the heavily tattooed felon who owns me body and soul.

I don’t know if I’m strong enough to resist the magnetic pull toward King that grows stronger every day.

He’s already saved me in more ways than one. Now it’s my turn to do whatever it takes to save him.

Even if that means marrying someone else…

Excerpt #1

He cupped my ass and lifted me up, wrapping my legs around his waist. “There was one point I’d made the decision to tell you the truth. I owed you that much. But then all the shit went down with Isaac and Preppy, so when I made the deal with your father for Max, I thought I was doing you a favor by giving you your life back and getting you out of all the shit that came with being in mine.”

I squeezed my thighs around his waist, rubbing myself against his hardness. I moaned. “But you weren’t giving me my life back.” I corrected. I placed my palms on his cheeks and held his face in my hands, searching for any sign in his eyes that what I felt for him might have been wrong, but instead what I found was a resounding need to fix what was broken between us. Tears formed in my eyes. “You were taking it away.” King’s lips parted. He ran his thumb across my lower lip, turning his head he kissed his way up my arm.

“Goosebumps,” King observed, running his fingertips across my already stimulated skin. I bit my lip and stifled a moan.

“It’s just the heat,” I lied.

“You’ve got that fucking right,” King growled, bending my wrist behind my back, his lips came crashing down over mine. We were a tangling of lips, clanking of teeth, sloshing through the water to better line ourselves up with each other. It wasn’t pretty.

It was need.

“I’m still fucking mad at you for letting me go,” I said into his mouth, while our tongues did things other parts of me throbbed to do.

King stilled and held my face away from his, our chests heaving in unison, my erect nipples rubbing against his hot hard skin as we panted together. Our breaths mingled in the air. He ran his hand down the side of my face and cupped my cheek in his palm. “I didn’t give you away, Pup. I released you.”

I stilled. “You released me?” I couldn’t hide the hurt in my voice. For some reason, releasing me sounded worse than letting me go.

King ran his tongue across the tip of my earlobe, holding me tightly against his warmth. Chills ran down my spine and into my very core and they had nothing to do with the temperature of the rain.

“I tried to release you, Pup. For Max. But there was a major problem with that plan, and no matter what happened, it would never have worked,” King confessed.

“Why is that?” I asked, needing to know, but at the same time acutely aware of the pulsing between my legs. Relief and release was only a scrap or two of fabric away. Throbbing for me.

“The problem was…you never released me,” King growled, crashing his lips to mine. He moaned into my mouth when I rubbed myself up against his straining erection. He pushed the fabric of my shorts aside and the second he parted my folds with his index finger, I shuddered. He plunged a long index finger inside of me, and for a second my eyes rolled back in my head until he withdrew it. I cried out in frustration, wiggling myself against him, needing him to make me feel anything other than empty.

Excerpt #2

King snarled. “You seem to have forgotten who the fuck I am, Pup. So I’m going to remind you.” He pressed his hips against mine. “I’m the man who took you against your will and handcuffed you to my fucking bed. I’m the man who wanted you, so I fucking kept you.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Do you really think you have a choice when it comes to being mine?”

King lifted me onto the dresser and pushed himself between my legs, forcing my legs apart. He held my wrists behind my back forcing my shoulders backwards and pushing my chest into his. My dress rode up to the tops of my thighs. King pushed a strand of hair behind my ears and leaned in to me, his lips just a breath away from mine. The room was getting hot. I couldn’t breathe. I needed…I don’t know what I needed. “No more questions.”

I opened my mouth to argue. “Stop fucking talking,” he snapped.

King lifted me off the dresser and carried me and set me down in front of the full-length mirror that hung on the closet door. He stood behind me. A head taller than me and outweighing me by a hundred pounds, our differences had never been more obvious. His dark jeans and dark tank top were a stark contrast to my little white eyelet sundress. My pale skin next to his tanned. My white hair to his black. It was a sight that made my knees weak. Because although the reflection in the mirror made our differences obvious, it also made me see how well the two fit together.

She attended Florida Gulf Coast University where she specialized in public speaking. After years working in real estate and new home construction, she decided it was finally time to stop pushing her dreams to the back burner and pursue writing seriously.

In the third grade she wrote her very first story about a lost hamster. It earned rave reviews from both her teacher and her parents.